On 08/07/2012 22:27, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> In the 15th and 16th century a key problem was that there were no accurate clocks. Accurate clocks were needed by ships at sea to determine their position. Smart individuals, such as the Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christian Huygens, worked and solved this problem with the creation of the pendulum clock along with its mathematical underpinnings.
Your history here is a bit off. Pendulum clocks are not much use at sea.
See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometers.
>
> What are the key technical problems of our time?
>
> What waters can we not sail today because we do not have the technology and the math and science underpinnings to enable it?
>
>
With the Longitude problem, the science was known but the technology was
missing. I'm not sure we have many problems in that category today. For
example, we know that room-temperature superconductors could solve a lot
of our problems, but finding them is a scientific problem rather than an
engineering one.
Michael Kay
Saxonica